Beyond torture: Knowledge and power at the nexus of social science and national security

In 2015, an independent inquiry into the American Psychological Association (APA) reached a damning conclusion: the association's leadership secretly collaborated with military officials to create a watered-down ethics policy that permitted psychologists to participate virtually without constraint in the Department of Defense's (DOD) interrogation program. The inquiry found that when it came to ethics, APA officials acted as if ‘what was best for DOD was best for APA’ (Hoffman et al., 2015: 23). It appeared that the APA leadership acted to ‘curry favor’ with the Defense Department not because the association relied directly on Pentagon money itself, but because APA officials understood that the discipline's continued growth would benefit if psychology remained on good terms with national security agencies (ibid.: 10–11, 68).

These revelations have focused attention on the clandestine collusion between APA and military officials and the implications that their actions pose for psychology's public and intellectual integrity. A number of observers have noted the irony that representatives of a discipline that claims to use ‘knowledge to improve the condition of individuals, organizations, and society’ facilitated acts that many Americans—not to mention international treaties—regard as torture (American Psychological Association, 2016: 3). In the wake of the Hoffman report, some scholars have called upon the APA to ‘end its affair with the U.S. military’ (Elkins, 2016: 106). This is a laudable goal. But it is easier said than done. Psychology's relationship to national security agencies is no short-term fling born of the War on Terror. Rather, it is nearly a century old and has in many instances been convenient for both partners. Psychology's contemporary relationship with national security agencies and interests must be understood within the broader history of the nexus between psychology and national security.

This history matters for two reasons. First, it demonstrates that psychology has grown in tandem with US national security agencies since World War I. Psychologists have long courted national security funding to nurture their intellectual development and public status. Many psychologists made their reputations by working on security-relevant problems. While the Hoffman report demonstrates that flagrant violations of ethics, professionalism, and perhaps even human rights marked the APA's role in its policies pertaining to torture, the close relationship between psychology and the military that made those violations possible was not the simple result of secretive or nefarious collusions. Rather, psychology's close relationship to national security agencies and concerns has long been a systematic, visible, and in some periods widely accepted feature of the discipline itself.

Second, the torture controversy is not the first time that psychologists have been confronted by the ethical, professional, and political questions that arise when scholarship operates in tandem with national security agencies and interests. During World War II and the Cold War, military and intelligence agencies mobilized psychologists to work on a variety of pressing security problems. Their collaborations posed vexing questions: What was the appropriate relationship between scholars and their federal patrons? To whom were researchers beholden: their patrons, their disciplinary communities, or the values of disinterested science? How, if at all, could researchers take security agency funding without militarizing social research or masking psychological manipulation behind the veneer of objective scientific research?

Psychologists and other social scientists occasionally reflected on these questions in the 1940s and 1950s, but with little urgency. In the second half of the 1960s, they exploded into public controversy as scholars, policymakers, and activists wrestled with the ethical implications of academic complicity in American military interventions in Latin America and Southeast Asia. For anthropologists and political scientists, these debates were public and fractious, if ultimately inconclusive. Psychologists, however, largely bypassed them. The fallout from this time period offers cautionary lessons for psychology now. It shows that even in the face of serious ethical and political discussion, finding solutions to the relationship between psychology and national security is profoundly difficult. But failure to fully confront the tangle of epistemic, economic, and institutional ties that have bound psychology and national security agencies can have adverse, long lasting, and unintended consequences.

Clandestine complicity: Secret support for psychological research

As the Hoffman report briefly recounts, the origins of the ‘harsh and abusive techniques’ used at Guantanamo lie in secret Cold War relationships between psychologists and their government patrons (Hoffman et al., 2015: 11). In 1949, psychologist Irving Janis warned the Air Force that the confessions at Stalin's show trials indicated that the Soviets were pioneering mind control tools. Concerned that the United States was falling behind in a psychological arms race, for three decades the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the armed services secretly funded millions of dollars’ worth of academic psychological research into ‘unconventional interrogation techniques’ under the guise of Projects Bluebird, Artichoke, MKULTRA, and others (quoted in ibid.: 77).

A number of academic psychologists willingly collaborated with national security officials interested in the psychological effects of sensory deprivation. In 1951 McGill University's Donald O. Hebb initiated a series of experiments, secretly funded by the Canadian Defence Research Board and monitored with interest by the CIA, to determine the relationship between deprivation, perception, and attitude change (McCoy, 2007: 404–6, 2012: 20). He soon discovered that in just two days, college students in sensory isolation suffered hallucinations and lost their grip on reality. According to historian Alfred McCoy, Hebb wrote to CIA officials in 1952 that his work was ‘opening up a field of study that is of both theoretical and practical significance’ (quoted in McCoy, 2012: 65). While Hebb's role in the subsequent development of sensory deprivation research is disputed (Brown, 2007), it is clear that his work helped inspire research that led to the CIA's profound insight—fundamental to so-called enhanced interrogation techniques—that psychological deprivation was at least as effective as physical torture for breaking down a detainee's resistance.

Hebb's work helped put sensory deprivation on the map in academic psychology. As McCoy (2006: 31) explains, national security agencies’ ‘alliance with behavioral science seems marvelously synergistic, placing mind-control research at the apex of the academic agenda and providing patronage that elevated cooperative scientists, particularly psychologists, to the first rank of their profession’. Less than a decade after Hebb confined McGill students in isolation chambers, over two hundred articles in leading psychology journals cited his work (McCoy, 2012: 69). Hebb subsequently became a leading figure in the discipline. He assumed the presidency of the APA in 1960. Research into sensory deprivation continued at a rapid pace, much of it in the open throughout the 1960s; the subject regularly appeared in scholarly journals and on panels at APA annual meetings (Kaye, 2009).

Hebb was not the only psychologist who was catapulted to new professional heights by virtue of his synergistic relationship to subjects of national security interest. Concerned that many psychologists would not openly or willingly accept CIA funding for research on interrogation or sensory deprivation, the agency constructed front agencies through which it could funnel research funds (McCoy, 2012: 62). The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology—a dummy foundation created by the CIA in 1955, and in 1961 rechristened the Human Ecology Fund (HEF)—passed hundreds of thousands of dollars to psychologists and other social scientists studying personality, cross-cultural communication, psychological measurement, artificial intelligence, and sensory deprivation. Many had no inkling that their sponsor was an intelligence agency that saw dual use in their projects (Price, 2016: 197–219). Others learned the true source of their funds but carried on unperturbed. Carl Rogers, who had been APA president in 1947, was initially unaware that the $30,000 he received from the society in the late 1950s came from the CIA. When he joined its board and learned the truth, he sanguinely protected the Fund's secret (Demanchick and Kirschenbaum, 2008; Lemov, 2011).

A number of these researchers, whether witting or unwitting collaborators, were or would become leading lights in the field. Harry Harlow (APA president, 1958) studied the relationship between debility, dependence, dread, and personality conditioning—the kind of research that would undergird the CIA's Kubark manual—with HEF support in the mid 1950s (Central Intelligence Agency, 1963; Price, 2016; Summers, 2008). Charles Osgood reached out to the CIA to support his research on cross-cultural communication, work relevant to crafting effective overseas propaganda. He received nearly $200,000 from HEF in the late 1950s and early 1960s (Marks, 1979: 158); Osgood was elected to the APA presidency in 1963.

Through the HEF and other fronts, CIA funds penetrated academic psychology. MKULTRA's reach extended into 44 colleges and universities; some researchers knew the sources of their funds, while others did not (Stephenson, 1978). That the CIA would turn to universities for insight is far from surprising. The agency was built on its relationships with elite universities, from the development of its precursor the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was staffed by Ivy League faculty, to its reliance on elite faculty to recruit new agents from among their brightest students (Johnson, 2019; Price, 2016). The agency secretly bankrolled dozens of independent organizations too, including the influential Asia Foundation, which received $8 million a year to support research, conferences, and academic exchange programs (Price, 2016: 184).

The military, too, provided secret support for psychology during the Cold War. Some CIA funds for sensory deprivation research were funneled through the Office of Naval Research (ONR). While the extent of the CIA/ONR program may never be known—the CIA destroyed many records of their behavior modification research program in the 1970s—historian Alfred McCoy speculates that Stanley Milgram's infamous experiments at Yale may have been supported by ONR (McCoy, 2006: 47–9). ¹ The armed services also funded considerable amounts of classified research into the psychology of weapons and psychological warfare at its federal contract research centers like the Human Resources Research Office (HumRRO) and at private contract research institutes like the American Institutes for Research and Psychological Research Associates (Watson, 1978). At Harvard, the Russian Research Center carried out research, some of it classified, into Soviet psychology with funds from the Air Force and the CIA. Publicly, the Center identified the Carnegie Corporation as its principal patron, but classified national security work helped it put Harvard Sovietology on the map (Diamond, 1992; Engerman, 2009). When Congressional investigations revealed the extent of clandestine intelligence support for psychology in the mid 1970s, the Senate's Church Committee pronounced the agency's impact on scholarship ‘massive’ (Price, 2016: 165).

Beyond Bluebird and Artichoke: The psychology–national security nexus in the open

However, it would be misleading to tell the story of the relationship between psychology and national security interests primarily through the history of clandestine funding programs. Such an account would perpetuate a false idea that without the actions of a few bad actors or agencies, academic scholarship would otherwise have been isolated from the corrupting influence of money or politics (Engerman, 2010: 398). In fact, much of the national security state's impact on scholarship came from activities that occurred in open relationships that psychologists courted as eagerly—sometimes more eagerly—than their federal patrons did.

Psychologists’ courtship of the military began in World War I. As one psychologist recounted at the APA's 75th annual meeting in 1967, the list of psychologists who contributed to the Great War—including James R. Angell, E. G. Boring, James McKeen Cattell, G. Stanley Hall, and Lewis M. Terman—‘reads like a roster of the authors of the great books of our time’ (Sperling, 1968: 98). Under the guidance of Robert Yerkes, psychologists developed intelligence tests that assessed the mental acumen of over 1.75 million literate and illiterate recruits by war's end (Carson, 1993). Psychologists developed morale programs for American troops and propaganda programs for enemies. And their theories of mass psychology shaped public discourse about democracy (Herman, 1995: 23–4, 55).

Psychology's newfound public relevance paid dividends. After the war, the number of stand-alone psychology departments ballooned; they boasted new buildings, new laboratories, new faculty lines, higher salaries, and an influx of students. The APA grew too, from 336 members in 1917 to over 1100 in fewer than 15 years (Camfield, 1992). The discipline's star among the sciences rose as well. By war's end, psychology was included among the fields represented in the National Research Council, which in 1919 was chaired by Angell (Samelson, 1992: 121).

These events were mere prelude to psychology's World War II expansion. While clinical psychologists carried on the work of screening and classifying recruits in that conflict, they also took advantage of the shortage of psychiatrists to expand their own professional turf by diagnosing and treating patients for the armed services (Herman, 1995). For researchers, the war offered a veritable laboratory of social problems. Far from reluctantly leaving the ivory tower, academic psychologists actively melded their intellectual interests and national security needs. Psychologist Henry Murray built a reputation for his psychological profiling tests by running the personality assessment program for OSS recruits (Miller, 2015). The military's support during the war nurtured entire fields of inquiry—clinical psychology, human factors analysis, small-group psychology, and psychological warfare, to name a few (Capshew, 1999; Herman, 1995; Lyons, 1969; Simpson, 1994).

The wartime spirit of martial and professional service outlived the conflict itself. World War II encouraged psychologists to equate ‘social responsibility with government service … and enlightened planning with behavioral expertise’ (Herman, 1995: 81). It also stoked their ambitions to pursue more large-scale, government-funded interdisciplinary research projects. Far from unwitting or reluctant participants in the cultivation of the national security–psychology nexus, many scholars actively framed their research in martial terms well into the 1950s and 1960s. Princeton psychologist Charles Bray, for example, explained to an audience of military and intelligence officials that the military's concern ‘with the atom, with space, with missiles and airplanes and submarines is only to persuade other men, in other parts of the world, that they cannot, without reason, impose their wills upon us’. Military conflict was fundamentally psychological, the product of ‘different political, social, and personal values and goals’ (quoted in Rohde, 2013: 9).

Such arguments won psychologists government support. For the first two decades after World War II, the military was a critical federal sponsor of psychological research. Between 1946 and 1956, ONR spent nearly $18 million on psychological research (Darley, 1957: 306). While some of that funding supported sensory deprivation work that would secretly inform military and intelligence interrogation programs, it also supported unclassified personnel and training, social psychological, and manpower research. By 1952, nearly 60 universities had ONR research contracts, many of them unclassified; four years later, the number of universities with unclassified ONR contracts had more than doubled (Darley, 1957; McCoy, 2006: 31). ONR funding resulted in the publication of over 800 articles in professional journals and another 60 books in the span of just 10 years (Darley, 1957: 317). Recognizing the centrality of the office to psychology's disciplinary development, the APA presented ONR with a ‘Certificate of Appreciation’ for its ‘exceptional contributions … to the development of American psychology’ in 1957 (ibid.: 305).

The military was so essential to psychology's growth, wrote one psychologist, that it might ‘do for psychology what the industrial revolution did for the physical sciences’ (quoted in Herman, 1995: 129). Another psychologist explained that ‘no major university today, public or private, engaged in graduate teaching and research can maintain its stature without the present partnership with the Federal Government’ (Darley, 1957: 321). In addition to accepting individual grants to their faculty, university administrations welcomed military-funded research centers to their campuses. By 1957, the Army alone was funding three university-affiliated federal contract research institutes that devoted significant resources toward psychology. At Johns Hopkins University, psychologists at the Operations Research Office (ORO, established 1948) studied combat effectiveness and troop motivation, the psychology of guerrilla fighters, and psychological warfare effectiveness (Watson, 1978: 464–5). At George Washington University, the staff of HumRRO (established 1951) studied leadership, motivation, troop training and performance, and psychological warfare (Lyons, 1969: 141–2). And American University's Special Operations Research Office (SORO, established 1956) created psychological operations campaigns, examined the mechanisms of successful cross-cultural communication, and studied the social psychology of revolution (Rohde, 2013).

For universities, military funding was an enormous institutional boon, one that converted sleepy academic institutions into research powerhouses (Leslie, 1993; Lowen, 1997). American University, for example, had by the early 1950s lost its accreditation twice, was in dire financial straits with a crumbling physical plant, and had no reputation as a site of social research. But after it contracted with the Army to establish SORO, it ranked among the top ten university conductors of federally funded social science and brought in over $100,000 a year in overhead (Rohde, 2013: 26). Yet, because institutions like SORO, HumRRO, and ORO were technically independent from the Army—they operated on an annual military contract, but were administered by universities and staffed by civilian social scientists—they seemed to be insulated from undue military oversight and influence.

Many scholars actively cultivated their ties to national security agencies. But they did so with some trepidation, for they worried about the intellectual, institutional, and political implications of their government ties. As early as 1941, communications expert Harold Lasswell warned that by enlisting scientific expertise to the service of national security, scholars and government officials might create a ‘garrison state’—a militarized, centralized, dictatorial bureaucracy run by ‘specialists on violence’ who subverted social, political, and intellectual pursuits to modern warfare (Lasswell, 1941: 455). A number of psychologists shared Lasswell's concern. In 1952, University of Minnesota psychologist John G. Darley, whose research into group dynamics was supported by ONR contracts, worried that although Naval support was beneficial from the standpoint of disciplinary growth—so much so that ‘like Ado Annie in Oklahoma we “cain't say no”’—the ‘Garrison State of Mind’ threatened to tilt psychology organizationally and intellectually toward the military (Darley, 1952: 720–1). From his position at the Air Training Command Human Resources Research Center, Bray too asked whether military-funded psychologists were ‘selling their souls for a mess of pottage’ (Bray, 1952: 711).

There was more at stake in the patronage question than the preservation of independent academic inquiry for its own sake. Expert knowledge is valuable to government in part because of its ostensible objective, neutral, and apolitical nature. By excluding the politically subjective, the arbitrary, and the ideological from policy decisions, psychology can be a powerful political tool, one that can render everything from personnel policies (like racial integration of the armed forces) to behavior modification programs immune from accusations that they are improperly politically motivated. But if social scientific knowledge is not disinterested—if it is captured by military, intelligence, or other political interests—its use in policy domains threatens to hide ideology or politics behind a thin mask of scientific rhetoric. This would be a direct violation of the very democratic values that experts and the national security state professed to protect (Rohde, 2013). Scholars working on security problems faced a challenge: how could they work in sustained contact with national security agencies without infecting their scholarship with politics?

Research grants and contracts—whether for entire institutes or individual research projects—seemed to provide a perfect bureaucratic framework for military-academic collaboration. By keeping researchers institutionally separate from government, they appeared to provide relevant and much-needed expertise to government while insulating scholarship from the distorting effects of politics. As the Hoffman report details, however, such grants and contracts do not guarantee autonomous, apolitical expertise. But they are not intellectually coercive; they maintain the appearance of scholarly autonomy. As anthropologist David Price has found, scholars working under military and intelligence grants and contracts during the Cold War ‘often pursued questions of their own design, for their own reasons’; that such research happened also to be of value to defense and intelligence agencies was not the result of coercion but shared intellectual and political interests (Price, 2016: xii–xiv).

While part of the story of psychology and national security in the Cold War involves secretive, clandestine research with bizarre, yet mundane, code names, much national security funding for psychology happened in the open and was welcomed by researchers and universities alike. As this history shows, since at least World War I, what was good for defense and intelligence agencies was also good for psychology. Military and intelligence money and influence was pervasive. By the early 1960s, the Defense Department's social research budget, at $15 million a year, exceeded the entire military research and development budget before World War II; much of that funding went to psychology (Herman, 1995: 128–9). By 1972, the DOD was funneling nearly $40 million into psychological research (National Science Foundation, 1973). Willful blindness to the reach of security influence was a feature of this system. Not only did grants and contracts protect a shared illusion of intellectual and institutional autonomy, but military and intelligence agencies never maintained centralized records of their research contracts, even when research was unclassified and conducted in the open (Rohde, 2013). It is no wonder that in the heyday of the Cold War, many psychologists endorsed the merger of psychology and security interests as in the best interests of both the discipline and the nation (Herman, 1995; Rohde, 2013).

Reckoning with power: Camelot, counterinsurgency, and the erosion of consensus

The apparently seamless synergy between scholarly and national security interests was called into question during the second half of the 1960s. As the Cold War battleground shifted from Europe to developing nations, the psychology of peoples in Africa, Asia, and Latin America took on new relevance. So too did the motivations, group psychology, and communications methods of guerrilla organizations and revolutionary movements. A number of psychologists pronounced the social psychology of revolution, internal warfare, and political and economic development the future of military psychology (Crawford, 1970: 330; Sperling, 1968; Windle and Vallance, 1964). The national security community eagerly funded them.

The Army's SORO was a key site of this research. Under the leadership of psychologist Theodore R. Vallance, interdisciplinary teams of social scientists analyzed foreign communications and designed propaganda campaigns for Indonesia, Thailand, and Pakistan. In an effort to help the military encourage the growth of anti-communist youth groups overseas, they sought to identify the personality characteristics most closely associated with charismatic political leaders. They also fielded psychological tests designed to reveal the characteristics of politicians that Colombian farmers most respected (Rohde, 2013). Armed with this knowledge, SORO psychologist William Lybrand argued, the military would be able to establish ‘a community of stable nations, where political change occurs peacefully’ (quoted in ibid.: 4).

The argument that psychology—and the behavioral sciences more broadly—could demilitarize the military represented an attempt to preserve the perception that such projects did not unduly militarize scholarship. But as public skepticism of American military and development interventions abroad grew over the 1960s, cracks began to show in the tidy façade of the research–national security relationship. Some of the first public signs of stress came in the summer of 1965, when scholars and politicians in Chile raised alarms that the US military was using social science as a cover for espionage. The subject of their concern was Project Camelot, a multimillion-dollar, multi-year unclassified study funded by the Army and managed by American University's SORO. Camelot was supposed to draw on psychology, political science, anthropology, and sociology to uncover the causes of communist insurgency in the developing world and identify policy interventions that could circumvent revolution. Instead, it sparked international concern and a Congressional investigation in Washington. To avert scrutiny, the Defense Department pulled the plug on the project before data collection ever began (Rohde, 2013).

Camelot's cancellation was followed by other events that extended concerns that the merger of academic and security interests was less than benign. In 1966, journalists at Ramparts magazine revealed that Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Center for International Studies—a principal site of interdisciplinary social research into international communications and nation-building—had been secretly funded by the CIA since 1951. Journalists also revealed that Michigan State University had allowed the CIA to use its academic technical assistance program as a front for counterespionage programs in Saigon. That program included instruction in interrogation methods that that likely grew out of CIA sponsored psychology research (Ernst, 1998). By the late 1960s, the role that social science played in an increasingly unpopular and bloody war further galvanized academic and public concern about the social science–national security nexus. In 1968, J. W. Fulbright, chair of the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee, held widely publicized Congressional hearings that tied the military's multimillion-dollar social science research program to its failed campaigns in South Vietnam (Rohde, 2013).

These events forced scholars to address the tangle of ethical and epistemological questions that they had thus far evaded. Were institutions like SORO and MIT's Center for International Studies legitimate scholarly endeavors or corrupted, militarized programs? Was it possible to reconcile the scholarly values of intellectual autonomy and intellectual neutrality with the demands of security community-funded research—demands that now appeared to many to be fundamentally political and value-laden? Under what conditions, if any, was it appropriate for university-based researchers to perform research related to national security programs? Could contract research be politically disinterested? Or did contracts make researchers servants of power and mouthpieces of the militarized status quo? At stake in their answers was the integrity, legitimacy, and public authority of security-funded research itself.

Individual social scientists answered these questions differently. Some argued that as long as researchers acknowledged and supported the policy goals that drove their sponsors’ research programs, they could perform security-funded research without moral or intellectual qualms. Others insisted that the only way to preserve scholarly integrity and intellectual autonomy was to withdraw from policy altogether. Political scientist Kalman Silvert suggested that social scientists restrict themselves to producing ‘data’ and ‘descriptive analyses’ and scrupulously refuse to suggest what policy actions their knowledge might imply were best (quoted in Rohde, 2013: 99). But others objected that this approach consigned social science to policy irrelevance. Science journalist Daniel Greenberg summed up the debate over research, politics, and relevance astutely. Scholars and policy officials, he wrote, ‘persist in striving for the impossible. They want the academic social sciences to partake of the presumed purity of the academic world and, at the same time, to serve as instruments of a government that quite readily acknowledges its involvement in some less than pristine activities around the world’ (ibid.: 108).

Some professional associations convened committees to consider the ethics of their members’ ties to national security agencies. In 1967, members of the American Political Science Association (APSA) learned that two high-ranking figures in its executive office had knowingly received secret funding from the CIA. The association promptly convened an ad hoc ethics committee. After two years of work, the committee concluded that it could not make any recommendations regarding appropriate relationships between national security agencies and political scientists without ‘a great deal of work’. APSA leadership disbanded the committee and left political scientists to determine for themselves how to navigate their ties to military and intelligence agencies (Rohde, 2013: 85).

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) fared slightly better. In the wake of Project Camelot's cancellation, the association charged its ethics committee with addressing the challenges of government-funded research. After a two-year study, the committee issued a non-binding ethical code that cautioned scholars against using their profession as a cover for espionage or intelligence gathering and reminded them that security agency sponsorship could pose challenges to scientific transparency. But it also recommended that scholars make their research available to government. Most anthropologists endorsed the code enthusiastically, in part because it did not infringe upon scholarly autonomy (Rohde, 2013: 84–5).

While psychologists were implicated in the research that came under fire in second half of the 1960s, by an accident of history, they evaded the challenges faced by AAA and APSA. Instead, the APA's attention was drawn to other critical ethical debates. As the APA's Public Information Officer, Michael Amrine, explained in an issue of the American Psychologist devoted in part to the Camelot controversy, ‘If psychological testing had not caused so much public controversy over the past year, it is very likely that, at least in Washington and among behavioral scientists, 1965 would be remembered as the year of “Project Camelot”’ (Amrine, 1966: 401). Instead, a Congressional investigation into psychological testing and selection methods, as well as the ethical challenges associated with the use of human subjects, the use of deception as a research tool, and pervasive racism in the discipline captured the APA's attention in the second half of the decade.

As a result, psychologists continued to publish endorsements of government-funded counterinsurgency research even when such subjects were lightning rods for controversy in other social science fields. In 1970, Meredith Crawford, the director of HumRRO, unapologetically lauded the value of military-funded research, including that into counterinsurgency and cross-cultural interaction, in the pages of the American Psychologist (Crawford, 1970). When a reader responded with outrage, arguing that the chief purpose of military-funded psychology was to turn ‘human beings into more efficient murder machines’, the journal published two letters defending Crawford and accusing his critic of ‘blind emotional pacifism’ (Kelley, 1971: 515; Leuba, 1971; Saks, 1970). And in 1972, SORO's former director Vallance continued to defend the now long-dead Camelot as an ‘objective, nonnormative study’ and argued that with proper care, psychologists could manage the multiple ethical and epistemological challenges posed by sponsored research (Vallance, 1972: 109).

Military-funded research relevant to interrogation and behavior modification also continued in the open. In 1971, Philip Zimbardo carried out his famous Stanford Prison Experiment. Funded by ONR, the project subjected college student volunteers to a mock prison environment—including dehumanizing guards and solitary confinement—in an effort to understand the group dynamics that led to prison abuse. A number of participants broke down under conditions that Zimbardo admitted included ‘physical and psychological abuse hour after hour for days’ (Zimbardo, 1973: 243). The fact that ONR funded the study as part of a broader contract with Zimbardo for ‘the investigation of conditions which facilitate antisocial behavior’ led at least one analyst to later question whether the study was not intended to produce insights relevant to breaking the will of captives (Watson, 1978: 262–4; Zimbardo, 1973: 249).

Researchers who raised ethical questions about Zimbardo's work—including Zimbardo himself—focused on questions of human subjects protections, not on its funding source. A few years later, when research into captivity, sensory deprivation, and behavior modification was tainted by revelations that the CIA had secretly supported such work in the 1950s and 1960s, behavior modification researchers cast their work as potentially benign, even beneficial. Behavior modification could dehumanize, but it could also help people develop ‘creativity and spontaneity’ (Stolz, Wienckowski, and Brown, 1975: 1039). In psychology, ethical and professional norms governing the relationship between scholarship and national security agencies and interests remained more accommodating than those of other social science disciplines well after the 1960s. Zimbardo, like a number of military and intelligence funded researchers before him, went on to assume the presidency of the APA. In 2008, the association honored him with an Award for Distinguished Career Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest (American Psychological Association, 2008).

The lessons of history

Psychology is now facing a long-delayed reckoning. As psychologists wrestle with the implications of their professional association's complicity in torture, events of the 1960s and early 1970s offer important cautionary lessons. Despite the efforts of professional associations and individual scholars to reconcile the complex ethical and epistemological terrain created by national security-funded research, they fell short of achieving a robust framework for ethical collaboration with national security agencies. Not only were professional associations reluctant to impose restrictions on their members; other actors, including the military and antiwar activists, also interceded in pursuit of their own interests. The result—only partly intended—was a national security–social science relationship that was increasingly militarized and hidden from the purview of academic social science by the mid 1970s.

Both APSA and AAA opposed establishing firm boundaries between their members and the federal government. In part, their reluctance to codify such relationships demonstrates the extent to which scholars valued the preservation of individual scholarly autonomy. It also demonstrates social scientists’ faith in the ability of scholars to self-police ethical terrain. Ralph Beals argued that as long as researchers were confident that the agency sponsoring their research had goals consistent with their own ‘professional and academic goals, values, and ethical systems’, they could rest assured that their work was sound (quoted in Rohde, 2013: 86). Beals’ argument rested on the widely shared conviction that the goals and processes of scientific discovery insulated researchers from the taint of ideology or misconduct. Indeed, researchers have long insisted their own disciplinary communities police research conduct—an entitlement rooted in the claim that science, if done properly, is value-free (Sarewitz, 1996). As sociologist Herbert Blumer argued in the midst of the controversies of the late 1960s, as long as scholars’ primary allegiance was to ‘the precepts and ideals of science’, they could be assured that mission agency-funded work met the requirements of ‘the scientific ethic’ (quoted in Rohde, 2013: 86).

Thus, even in the explosive 1960s, scholarly autonomy trumped ethical accountability. This observation is not an indictment of social scientists at the time. Rather, it calls attention to the deep epistemic commitments that have insulated scholarship from some of the most challenging problems at the heart of the social science–national security nexus. Beals, Blumer, and other scholars who probed the ethics of security-funded social science were genuinely worried about the national security community's impact on research. But their desire to leave researchers unfettered in their pursuit of knowledge (and therefore funding) left them unable to respond collectively to insist on a collective, consensual, and binding response to the ethical and intellectual challenges posed by national security funding. Instead, they left individual researchers to decide for themselves what research crossed the lines of ethicality and intellectual freedom—a position that is notably predicated on the assumption that researchers acting in the best interests of science are also acting in the best interests of society and humanity, whatever those might be.

As professional communities struggled to shore up their commitments to scholarship and relevance, the military seized the moment to secure its own interests. After canceling Project Camelot, the Defense Department's head of research and development mandated that all social research projects that might imply Pentagon involvement in foreign countries be security-classified. It also instructed its intramural research facilities and contract research centers to subcontract politically sensitive research with universities or individual scholars in order to camouflage the military's involvement in research that would raise political or ethical questions if its sponsorship were exposed (Rohde, 2013: 88).

Many social scientists supported the Defense Department's efforts to protect security-funded research in the late 1960s because other government forces stood ready to constrain their research. After the embarrassment of Camelot, the Johnson administration gave the State Department the authority to monitor all federally funded social science research that might impact foreign relations. This was a potentially broad mandate, one opposed by most social scientists, who believed that the department was ‘not highly competent’ when it came to understanding social research (quoted in Rohde, 2013: 80). To lobby the State Department to interpret its mandate narrowly, the Defense Department contracted with the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to establish an advisory committee to defend Defense-sponsored programs. The committee was composed of elite social scientists, including such stalwart national security allies as psychologist Lyle Lanier, who chaired the Defense Science Board Panel on Behavioral Sciences while serving on the NAS Committee; anthropologist and FBI informant George Murdock; and political scientist and notorious hawk Ithiel de Sola Pool. The committee quickly devised a set of superficial and non-intrusive guidelines for State Department oversight (Larsen, 1992: 88; Rohde, 2013: 79; US House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 1965: 190).

The committee succeeded. Beginning in 1966, the State Department vetted all social research funded by the armed services, the CIA, and a number of other agencies that involved foreign travel or contact with foreign nationals. But the only substantive question the department considered was: If publicly exposed, might the study ‘prove seriously embarrassing to the Government’? (quoted in Rohde, 2013: 81). Initially intended to rein in military influence over social science, the review process instead deepened it and made it less transparent. Rather than rejecting potentially problematic studies, the State Department typically required that agencies increase classification levels. Because classification seemed like a means to protect research against a hostile State Department bent on its own unethical restrictions of social research, few social scientists expressed concerns that increased levels of classification posed new ethical problems (ibid.).

In the second half of the 1960s, the military and social scientists drew on security classification and official government advisory roles to mitigate outside oversight or accountability of their work. As Harold Brown, director of research for the Defense Department, explained in Camelot's wake, ‘The easiest way to get a project approved is to promise to classify the results’ (Rohde, 2013: 88). These actions further tightened the bonds between national security agencies and social researchers, helping to mute the ethical and epistemic debates about the politics of national security knowledge.

The enhanced use of security classification drove security-funded social science research further from the purview of other scholars and the public. The security–social science nexus became even more opaque in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as activist mobilization against the Vietnam War drove military and intelligence funded research off campus. As part of their antiwar mobilization, student activists demanded that their universities remove classified and DOD-funded research from their campuses in an effort to reduce the national security's state reach into scholarship and public life. The Army's HumRRO was removed from the campus of George Washington University; SORO departed from American University, where students accused it of awarding ‘degrees in counter-insurgency and develop[ing] techniques to repress the people of the Third World’ (quoted in Rohde, 2013: 113). And the Institute for Defense Analyses, a Pentagon-funded research consortium operated by 12 universities and well known for its counterinsurgency research in Vietnam and Thailand, was severed from its institutional homes, which included Columbia, Stanford, Princeton, and the University of Michigan (Greenberg, 1968: 745). Between 1969 and the early 1970s, academic institutions exiled dozens of university-based contract research institutes from their grounds.

But instead of closing down, many such institutes privatized and continued their work. SORO, for example, was absorbed into to the American Institutes for Research, a private contract research organization created in 1946 by former Army Air Force psychologist John C. Flanagan (Rohde, 2013: 117–19). Under the direction of the psychologist and former HumRRO and SORO researcher Preston Abbott, researchers continued to perform the same work they had at SORO. They developed cross-cultural communications tools for troops stationed in Korea, studied the psychology of military nation-building programs, and assessed the psychology of counterinsurgency in Thailand. As members of a private research institute, they were also free to apply their knowledge of counterinsurgency to domestic policy. Former SORO researchers repurposed their studies of counterinsurgency overseas to instruct US police forces about the best methods to contain political dissent at home. Now located outside of academic settings, however, many such researchers ceased publishing in the peer-reviewed academic literature or presenting at academic conferences. While they were at SORO, the unclassified results of research had often been publicly available. But once they were ensconced in private institutes, such work could be treated as proprietary and made less available for public and scholarly consumption (ibid.: 131–41). Yet, because this work was conducted outside of academic institutions and increasingly by career research contractors rather than academic social scientists, scholars and activists concerned about the threats posed by the social science–security nexus failed to notice its continuation, reinforcing its opacity. Dense ties between psychology and national security endured into the 1970s and 1980s, but lost their visibility.

Policymakers, student activists, and academic critics of mission agency-funded social science sought to reduce militarization, both for the sake of intellectual integrity and as a means to rein in the growth of the national security state in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These events reduced the specter of militarized social research on university campuses and in academic social science. But they did nothing to settle the challenging epistemological and ethical questions that the longstanding partnership between social science and national security raised. By the mid 1970s, military-funded social science was more fully ensconced in contract research institutes like American Institutes for Research (AIR) and HumRRO that had close ties to national security agencies. Intramural military psychology, too, continued unperturbed. Like AIR's founder Flanagan, personnel in these agencies often took advantage of the contract research world's revolving door, moving regularly from government positions to contract research institutes (Rohde, 2013).

That the events of the late 1960s and early 1970s led to these outcomes is not an indictment of social scientists or activists in the Vietnam War era. Instead, their failures—and the Defense Department's successes—demonstrate how challenging the landscape of the national security–social science nexus is. It is populated by the sometimes overlapping, sometimes divergent professional responsibilities, intellectual interests, and political goals of individual scholars, professional associations, and government agencies. It is powerfully shaped by patronage relationships. And it is shrouded by a contracting system that is nontransparent by design and whose opacity has frequently benefitted both government agencies and their research partners.

The now common practice of private research contracting facilitated relationships like the one between psychologists Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen and their national security sponsors. It is far from unusual for psychologists to be contracted to provide expertise to federal agencies, even when those questions involved interrogation and detention. Nor is it unusual for a retired DOD psychologist like Jessen to join forces with colleagues to create a research firm like Mitchell Jessen & Associates. And especially because the work of Mitchell and Jessen dealt with interrogation, secrecy about their activities and affiliations was treated as a given, even within the APA (Hoffman et al., 2015: 45). After all, the national security community and its researchers have embraced secrecy for decades as a means to protect their work. The collusion that led APA officials to follow DOD's wishes regarding psychologists’ participation in interrogation programs can be seen as another end-run around the difficult ethical challenges posed by the social science–security nexus.

New war, old questions

Psychology has not been the only field challenged by its relevance to the War on Terror. Defense secretary Robert Gates created the Minerva Research Initiative in 2008 as a means to overcome the distrust that he argued has separated academic social science and the Pentagon since the Vietnam era. The Initiative funds social research that is of both scholarly and strategic relevance, like the psychology of radicalization and the politics of stability operations. While some social scientists laud the program, others have criticized it for enlisting social science in producing ‘outcomes in the US interest (as conceived by its promoters) via scholarship as well as military force’ (Gearty, 2008). Just as their predecessors did the 1960s, critics worry that military-funded projects motivated by security concerns may enlist social science in the support of ‘non-democratic actions or governments’ (Koonin et al., 2013: 11).

The Cold War era argument that social research can civilianize the military, rather than militarize social science, has also re-emerged in the War on Terror. In 2007, Army brigades in Afghanistan and Iraq turned to social science for insights into local cultures and politics under the auspices of the Human Terrain System (HTS). Designed to create a conduit for social scientific knowledge into military counterinsurgency operations, HTS placed social scientists—often, but not always, anthropologists—with units on patrol. Critics pointed out that program members wore military uniforms and often carried weapons while collecting information on local political leaders and community concerns. The program, they charged, inappropriately repurposed social science to military ends, and perhaps deployed anthropology as a cover for intelligence gathering. The Board of the AAA pronounced the program an ‘unacceptable application of anthropological expertise’ and questioned whether the work qualified as research at all (quoted in Zehfuss, 2012: 178). The deaths of three Human Terrain social scientists (Michael Bhatia, Nicole Suveges, and Paula Lloyd—all graduate students) in 2008 and 2009 lent credence to allegations that the program was more martial than peaceful (Lamb, Orton, and Davies, 2013). As many psychologists did in the wake of the APA interrogation scandal, anthropologists argued that there was ‘a contradiction between the goal of anthropology, to help local populations, and the goals of the army’ (quoted in Zehfuss, 2012: 178). The Army terminated the program in 2014, but social scientists have yet to reach a consensus on how to resolve the larger contradictions animating projects and institutions where military and scholarly interests and values intersect.

The social sciences and national security institutions and values have been deeply entwined for a century. The financial, intellectual, and institutional ties that bind social researchers and national security agencies will continue to present social scientists with serious ethical challenges. Under what circumstances can researchers work with or for security agencies but maintain their intellectual autonomy? What about their personal and professional moral integrity? Do social scientists have a moral obligation to serve their nation in times of national security crisis? Or is patriotic service a false moral code that merely facilitates professional and personal self-interest? Is it possible for social scientists to control the political consequences of their research? Are they morally obligated to do so, or does the application of knowledge lie beyond the bounds of their moral obligations? Some collaborations, like the APA's complicity in torture, clearly cross whatever line might exist between ethical professional behavior and astonishing violations of professional and human decency. But whether there is such a line, and where it is located, is a question that thus far shows little sign of resolution.

The temptation to downplay the complex ethical questions that animate the social science–security nexus is high. Financial dependence only intensifies it. As the APA inquiry notes, the Defense Department ‘is one of the largest employers of psychologists and provides many millions of dollars in grants or contracts’ to researchers every year (Hoffman et al., 2015: 14). Other social sciences also rely significantly on the defense sector for research funds and employment. Excising defense funding from social science is especially challenging when thousands of individual careers, as well as major sites of ostensibly neutral scientific advising, like the National Academy of Sciences, are tied to national security interests. It is further challenging for psychology, given that security funding serves as a critical source of support for various subfields that are not necessarily implicated in politically problematic domains, like personnel psychology and computational social science (although these fields are themselves far from value-free or innocent of ethical challenges).

But the intellectual and public credibility of psychology is at stake. So too is the relationship of scholarly expertise to democratic policy action. Coming to terms with the social science–security relationship requires reconciling scholarly and national commitments, individual and professional ethics, and particular normative stances on what the purpose of social science should be in policy domains.

History cannot solve this challenge, but it can serve as a useful guide. For a time, especially in the 1960s, social scientists engaged in a wide-ranging discussion of the challenges that they faced as they worked on security-related problems. They proffered an array of solutions, from apolitical positivism to an embrace of expertise as an activist mission directed toward specific political ends to which they assented. But their efforts fell short when other forces intervened to force bureaucratic closure. Threatened by the State Department, social scientists allied with the Defense Department to deflect scrutiny from their fields. At the same time, ethics committees sought ameliorative solutions to contain ethical conflicts. Robust, transparent discussion of the ethical tensions inherent in policy-relevant scholarship vanished from professional discussions. Those tensions never went away; they merely faded from view, only to reassert themselves dramatically the next time the security community turned to the social sciences for support.

In the wake of the APA's actions, psychologists have rightly called for a housecleaning at the highest ranks of the association. Stopping there may be tempting, for it could bring closure. But it would be a mistake. To confront the ethical challenges posed by the security relevance of their field, it is imperative that psychologists institutionalize wide-ranging discussions about the ethical and political challenges implicit in the mobilization of expert knowledge in democratic politics, and especially in policy related to national security. This is especially critical in a polity like the United States, where an increasing number of realms fall under the purview of national security (Dudziak, 2012). Indeed, the ultimate goal of such discussion should not be closure; it is doubtful such discussions will solve the challenges posed by the mobilization of expertise in democratic politics to the satisfaction of all psychologists. Instead, it should be a broader political reckoning with the forces of militarization—one that is aimed at demoting the status of national security as the prime mover of research funds and elevating the status and budgets of federal agencies that make human flourishing—which are rightfully the fundamental normative ends of the social sciences—their priority.